DayZ patch makes berry-pickers of bandits, ends "backpack-Inception"

The DayZ standalone is now in Early Access; check out our DayZ review.

Welcome to DayZ Experimental Branch! You can drop the salute, son - we do things differently here. Leave your regulation rifle and canned food at the door - we’ll issue you with a sawed-off shotgun and all the berry-foraging skills you’ll need to survive the Eastern European apocalypse.

DayZ’s experimental branch is a subset of servers made accessible via Steam’s application settings. Opt-in, and you’ll be subject to its dev team’s wildest and newest ideas. Everything that standalone DayZ will eventually be comes through there first - as well as a few things that it probably won’t.

An experimental patch yesterday introduced a strange array of new features, including the chance to craft sawed-off shotguns and open cans using saws - or alternatively, to go feral and eat the fruits of the local flora.

The most far-reaching additions, however, are most likely a brand new coastal harbour town in Svetloyarsk - plus a fix that prevents backpacks from being stacked inside one another for infinite storage opportunities. That’s the sort of exploit you consider fair game if you grew up on the crippling inventory sizes of the early Infinity Engine games. O, for a Bag of Holding.

Here’s the changelog in full. Can you handle all the change, all at once? Guess we’ll find out:

Fixed:

Niosh mask (respirator) inventory size fixed to 1/1 slot.

Missing strings for BE popup for alternate languages, set to English while translations are being done.

Added Hiking pants (both long and short ones) and Canvas pants including their color variants into loot spawns

Added hacksaw into the loot spawns

Added shotgun into loot spawns

Berry picking

Added Hacksaw into loot spawns

Saw-off shotgun recipe

Opening cans with saw

Painting Mosin now supported w/ spraypaint

Added spraypaint can into loot spawns

Coastal harbor town of Svetloyarsk (and surrounding areas)

A friend bought me Arma II over Christmas to “show [me] the ropes” in DayZ - but plenty of others have gone ahead and bought into the decidedly shaky new alpha standalone version instead. Have you? If not, why not?